• EP40: The Conspiracy Dilemma

  • Jan 6 2021
  • Length: 32 mins
  • Podcast

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EP40: The Conspiracy Dilemma

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  • In this episode, the guys talk about when fake news takes over your brand and where the line might be in getting involved with debunking conspiracy theories. Chad talks about why eCommerce sites can't let the algorithms run wild and Nico lays out all the latest conspiracies. There are a lot of conspiracy theories out there: plenty of people believe there’s more to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and some think that the U.S. military experiments on aliens and their spacecrafts inside Area 51 that there is a tourism industry in Roswell, New Mexico built around the conspiracy. Another popular conspiracy theory is Bigfoot. Just how popular can Bigfoot be? Well, as of November, 2020 there have been 2,032 reported sightings on Bigfoot in Washington state alone. What these three conspiracy theories have in common is that they have nothing to do with marketing. However in today’s episode we talk about one case where corporate marketing and conspiracy theories meet. CSN Stores was founded in 2002, the name derived from a combination of its two founders' initials: Niraj Shah and Steve Conine. CSN Stores did well in the beginning. In 2006, the company earned $100 million in sales, and between 2007 and 2010 it expanded in the United States and in international markets.  In 2008, Boston Business Journal ranked CSN Stores as the #1 fastest-growing private e-commerce company in Massachusetts, and the #4 fastest-growing private company overall. By 2011, Shah and Conine decided to rebrand CSN Stores.  The goal of the rebranding was to direct traffic to a single site and to unify the aesthetic of the company.  One of the major ways they accomplished this was by changing the company’s name from CSN to Wayfair. Some people may still be stuck back on the name change thing. If so, you might be wondering, ‘What does Wayfair even mean?’  Nothing. It was chosen by a branding agency. ‘Wayfair’ is simply a combination of two words that tested well with focus groups. After all, as of June 2020, anything to do with Wayfair and names is suspicious. Names are what led people to believe Wayfair was part of a human trafficking ring. Claims of Wayfair’s human trafficking first appeared on June 14th, 2020 having originated in the QAnon community. It started when a well-known activist tweeted about the high price of storage cabinets being sold online by Wayfair. They went on to point out that the cabinets were "all listed with girls' names." Other users then began alleging that the pieces of furniture were named after girls because they actually had children hidden in them as part of a supposed child trafficking ring.  QAnon followers continued to make supposed links between the fact that some pieces of Wayfair furniture are expensive and named after girls, the names of whom match actual cases of missing children in the US. Wayfair claimed the astronomical pillow prices were a glitch. That’s when QAnon activists started to put a new theory forward.  They said that after they put stock-keeping unit (SKU) numbers of specific Wayfair products into Yandex - a major Russian search engine - images of young women would appear in the search results. Putting Wayfair products’ SKU numbers into Yandex did return image results of young women. The explanation for which came down to… a glitch in the search engine. In fact, Newsweek reported that a Yandex search for "any random string of numbers" would return the same results. Despite any and all debunking, the digital wildfire had spread. According to Facebook-owned social media analytics tool CrowdTangle, as of July 2020, the term Wayfair generated 4.4 million engagements on Instagram and prompted more than 12,000 posts nearly a million direct engagements on Facebook. As far as their response goes, Wayfair kept it short and simple. They came to their own defense saying, "there is of course no truth to these claims.” Fortunately for Wayfair and their rather unenthusiastic defense,
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